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Found 46 article(s) for author 'William Kerr'

The Plight of the Graying Tech Worker. William Kerr, April 2019, Paper, “High-skilled immigration is dramatically transforming the tech sector in the United States. 1 In 1975, immigrants accounted for one in 12 inventors in America. Today it’s one in 3.5. This surge is due to immigrant concentration in science and engineering fields, and factors that make the United States attractive, such as access to the latest technologies and high pay levels. The impact has been most evident in advanced technology sectors in areas such as Boston and Silicon Valley, but non-tech companies including JPMorgan.” Link

The Gift of Global Talent: How Migration Shapes Business, Economy & Society. William Kerr, 2018, Book, “The global race for talent is on, with countries and businesses competing for the best and brightest. Talented individuals migrate much more frequently than the general population, and the United States has received exceptional inflows of human capital. This foreign talent has transformed U.S. science and engineering, reshaped the economy, and influenced society at large. But America is bogged down in thorny debates on immigration policy, and the world around the United States is rapidly catching up, especially China and India. The future is quite uncertain, and the global talent puzzle deserves close examination.” Link

Stickiness on digital labour platforms and ethnic networks. William Kerr, Christopher Stanton, August 27, 2018, Opinion, “Online labour platforms such as Upwork facilitate interactions between employers and employees for a wide range of tasks. This column provides some first evidence on flows and substitution across countries on these new digital platforms. In contrast to classic trade patterns in products, contract placements via Upwork are frequently cross-border and North-South in nature. The findings also suggest that employers leave the platform in response to wage bid increases rather than substituting away from their target search location. Diaspora networks, in particular the Indian diaspora, still matter for how contracts are placed at the global level.” Link

Immigrant Entrepreneurship in America: Evidence from the Survey of Business Owners 2007 & 2012. William Kerr, April 2018, Paper, “We study immigrant entrepreneurship and firm ownership in 2007 and 2012 using the Survey of Business Owners (SBO). The survival and growth of immigrant-owned businesses over time relative to native-founded companies is evaluated by linking the 2007 SBO to the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD). We quantify the dependency of the United States as a whole, as well as individual states, on the contributions of immigrant entrepreneurs in terms of firm formation and job creation. We describe differences in the types of businesses started by immigrants and the quality of jobs created by their firms.” Link

High-Skill Migration and Agglomeration. William Kerr, 2017, Paper, “This review considers recent research regarding high-skilled migration. We adopt a data-driven perspective, bringing together and describing several ongoing research streams that range from the construction of global migration databases, to the legal codification of national policies regarding high-skilled migration, to the analysis of patent data regarding cross-border inventor movements. A common theme throughout this research is the importance of agglomeration economies for explaining high-skilled migration. We highlight some key recent findings and outline major gaps that we hope will be tackled soon.” Link

Growth through Heterogeneous Innovations. William Kerr, December 16, 2016, Paper, “We build a tractable growth model where multi-product incumbents invest in internal innovations to improve their existing products, while new entrants and incumbents invest in external innovations to acquire new product lines. External and internal innovations generate heterogeneous innovation qualities, and firm size affects innovation incentives. This framework allows us to analyze how different types of innovation contribute to economic growth and how the firm size distribution can have important consequences for the types of innovations realized. Our model aligns with many observed empirical regularities, and we quantify our framework by matching Census Bureau operating data with patent data for U.S. firms. We observe that internal innovation scales moderately faster with firm size than external innovation.”Link

Global Talent Flows. William Kerr, November 6, 2016, Paper, “The global distribution of talent is highly skewed and the resources available to countries to develop and utilize their best and brightest vary substantially. The migration of skilled workers across countries tilts the deck even further. Using newly available data, we first review the landscape of global talent mobility, which is both asymmetric and rising in importance. We next consider the determinants of global talent flows at the individual and firm levels and sketch some important implications. Third, we review the national gatekeepers for skilled migration and broad differences in approaches used to select migrants for admission. Looking forward, the capacity of people, firms, and countries to successfully navigate this tangled web of global talent will be critical to their success.” Link

Harnessing the Best of Globalization. William Kerr, Fall 2016, Paper, “Executives in large companies are seeking to harness globalization in new ways when launching their ventures — and for good reason. The opportunities for global businesses are expanding thanks to rapidly emerging product markets, the worldwide race for talent, and the widening impact of digitization. Moreover, success stories such as Airbnb Inc., Uber Technologies Inc., and Rocket Internet SE are spurring the imaginations of new entrepreneurs while highlighting the vulnerability of many traditional businesses.” Link

Innovation network. William Kerr, October 11, 2016, Paper, “We describe the strength and importance of the innovation network that links patenting technology fields together. We quantify that technological advances spill out of individual fields and enrich the work of neighboring technologies, but these spillovers are also localized and not universal. Thus, innovation advances in one part of the network can significantly impact nearby disciplines but rarely those very far away. We verify the strength and stable importance of the innovation network by showing how past innovations can predict future innovations in other fields over 10-y horizons. This better understanding of how scientific progress occurs and how inventions build upon themselves is an important input to our depictions of the cumulative process of innovation and its economic growth consequences.” Link

Immigrants Play a Disproportionate Role in American Entrepreneurship. William Kerr, October 3, 2016, Opinion, “Immigration is one of the most divisive and polarizing topics today. Do immigrants take American jobs, or help our economy grow? Do immigrants drain our welfare funds, or can they help refill public coffers as our baby boomers retire? One argument you tend to hear in the immigration debate in the U.S. is that there is a fixed number of jobs in the economy — and immigrants just compete for a slice of the pie rather than helping the pie grow. This perspective is less prevalent when talking about startups, however, because the rate of entrepreneurship has declined significantly in the U.S. over the last 30 years, and fewer startups are being generated today.” Link

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